Moment to Moment: The Transformative Power of Everyday Life
224
Moment to Moment: The Transformative Power of Everyday Life
224Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819228796 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2013 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Moment to Moment
The Transformative Power of Everyday Life
By Amy Sander Montanez
Church Publishing, Inc.
Copyright © 2013 Amy Sander MontanezAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2879-6
CHAPTER 1
INNER WORK IS GOD'S WORK: TRANSFORMED FROM WITHIN
Start close in,
Don't take the second step
Or the third,
Start with the first
Thing
Close in,
The step you don't want to take.
—David Whyte
Dr. Charles Brewer was one of those professors that students loved and feared. I felt both privileged and punished taking his Experimental Psychology class while attending Furman University from 1974–1978. His tests were known to stump even the brightest students, and his lectures were animated but dense. Students were alternately laughing at his antics or panicking about the material being presented.
I showed up one day with a particularly malnourished imagination, having been up most of the night working on an experiment that involved rats and conditioning. I have no idea what question I asked, but after Dr. Brewer answered it, he walked over to my desk, stood within inches of me, stared down his very straight, thin nose, looked through me with his intense eyes, and delivered his famous saying, "Everything is related to everything else, dammit Ms. Sander, and don't you ever forget it."
Somehow this statement began to worm its way into my heart and mind. As my journey with spirituality and psychology continued, I came to believe that spirituality and psychology are intimately connected. Good spirituality is innately therapeutic. The experience of God, felt, lived, and embraced should, indeed, heal us. Good psychology, depth psychology, should not be restricted to solving problems of daily living, but should also be attending to the unique soul of the individual. So related are these two disciplines that I imagine them like a double helix DNA molecule, one thread informing the other until there is no artificial divide, no turf war. These disciplines have evolved beyond the dualism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and we know now that we can allow for a personal, mystical experience of the Holy, at the same time believing in the scientific knowledge we have of the human psyche.
My personal/professional work as a therapist and spiritual director has only affirmed this belief. I have, from my professional beginnings, had the dissonant experience of trying to separate these two fields. Why? Because my therapy clients who were willing to explore their spiritual beliefs healed more quickly and reported experiences of transformation. Those seeing me for spiritual direction expressed a greater sense of wholeness and healing when they allowed their psychological work and wounding to enter into the process.
Over time I added one more thread to the helix, the body. That sacred place where our psyches, souls, hearts, and minds are housed, our bodies don't lie. They store memories and experiences, and paying attention to our bodies can often lead us to our own truths. Sometimes on the journey of transformation, we have to focus on one thread at a time, as if untangling this triple helix. We look at the psyche, the spirit, and the body separately, not because they are separate, but because it makes dealing with a complex system manageable when we do. The deep healing comes, though, when we start to integrate body, mind, and spirit. It doesn't matter which thread—body, mind, or spirit—we start with first. In the end, we weave the pieces back together into a beautiful helical creation, stronger now with each strand healed.
This process of healing and being healed, of living into our uniqueness and fullness, is, to me, the greatest joy in life. We are all trying to find our way back Home, home to our holy nature, and this is how we do it, healing thread by thread. I believe this kind of personal transformation requires three things of us: courage, perseverance, and community.
Courage, because one of the hardest things we do as people who believe in transformation is to look at the truth of ourselves. Being vulnerable and truthful with ourselves, God, and others is courageous work. Sometimes the process of this inner work, the process of claiming our personal truths can feel negative, dark, and full of grief. For some of us, it is even scary to look at our light and our strengths. Somehow we know that our lives will change if we claim and share our stories and our personal truths. We also know that we can't control how they will change, and giving up that control can be frightening. It can also be freeing.
That is why perseverance is necessary. Transformation is not an easy process and there is no quick fix. Changing any system is always difficult, and changing our inner system might be the most difficult change of all. I credit my mother with helping me at a young age begin to understand the process of transformation. Her symbol for transformation was the butterfly. Every imaginable presentation of butterflies adorned our house—paintings, sun-catchers, napkins, bathroom wallpaper and towels, figurines, tchotchkes, clothing, jewelry, and tote-bags. And though the beauty and color of butterflies surrounded me in my home, I learned that the process of becoming one was not easy. I watched this happen one time when I was in grade school and I had a terrarium in my bedroom. Inside the terrarium was a caterpillar cocoon on a stick. I awoke one morning to see the tip of a wing sticking out of the cocoon. When I came home from school that day and raced up the stairs to my bedroom, just a fraction more of the black wing was visible. "Mom, why is this taking so long?" I yelled. She came up to my room. I still remember what she said to me. "Becoming a completely new creature is slow work, Amy. Maybe the butterfly is tired and needs a break. Don't worry. The butterfly knows that it was meant to be a butterfly, and it will continue to come out of that cocoon when it is ready. It will persevere." And like the butterfly, sticking with the process and believing we are worth it, we will come out transformed into our own unique Self.
In the two decades that I have worked with the transformative process, the aspect that seems the hardest for some of us is belonging to and participating in community. Most of us need support and encouragement, so having a sense that we are not in this process of transformation alone can go a long way in helping us stay on the path. However, honest community makes us vulnerable and open, so the possibility to be hurt again is very real. Because it is in relationship that we get hurt, it is also in relationship that we heal, practice transformation, and see the fruits of our psycho/spiritual labor. The paradox of risk and reward is truly felt when we decide to enter into any honest relationship. That's simply the truth. You might get hurt. And, you might get healed. You have to weigh the risk. When I do, I always come out on the side of community and relationship. For some, a faith community is the answer. For others, a support group like a 12-Step group is the answer. Groups that form around similar interests like women's groups, men's groups, Bible studies, book clubs, dream groups, and writing groups can become healing communities.
For some of us, becoming vulnerable, honest, and open to the quiet and loving support of friends and family may be all that is necessary. In whatever way we decide to engage in community, all we have to do is start, take that first step, and the Holy One will be there, supporting and guiding our efforts. A community relationship becomes transformative when it is lived as a sacrament, "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" (The Book of Common Prayer, 857).
Experience has taught me that inner work and the transformative process are well worth the effort. Perhaps you could find guidance in a therapist, spiritual teacher, soul friend, or safe group. Use all the trusted resources you can find. Learning a contemplative form of prayer, sometimes called meditation, has been an indispensable part of the process for me and many others. Finding a way to still our minds and connect with the Holy One is an experience that can positively change our perception of ourselves and the world.
Dr. Brewer was a brilliant psychologist and passionate educator. What I think he might not have realized was that he was a spiritual mystic. Everything is related to everything else. In our earthly form, we are a miraculous helical creation, differing threads woven together to make a perfect whole. And dammit, don't you ever forget it.
Ready?
Do you want to be healed?
—John 5:6 (RSV)
When the student is ready, the student will see the teacher.
—Peggy Van Antwerp Hill, PhD
In my childhood home, whenever we were getting ready to go somewhere, anywhere, to church, on vacation, to a party, or out for a visit, my mother would say, "I'm ready," and my father would walk out the door and start the car. If the kids were going along, we would follow. This would start the inevitable tension. After a few minutes, my father would start honking the horn, saying things like, "Where is your mother? She said she was ready." Sometimes he would send one of us in to "check on her," which really meant to hurry her along.
"I'm ready," to my mother, meant that she was in her slip with her jewelry on, and that she would, momentarily, put on her dress, change her purse, shut out the lights, check on the pets, lower the thermostat, put on her coat, apply her lipstick, and then walk out the door. By the time she appeared, my father would be frustrated, silent, and angry.
Sometime in the 1980s I laughed my way through a magazine article while waiting at a doctor's office. Written by a clever author, whose name I cannot remember, the article talked about stages of readiness. There was "ready," which in my life was my mother in her slip and jewelry. Then there was "really ready," which translates to my mother dressed and now changing her purse. There was "ultra-ready," which would have been my mother coming down the stairs, checking on the pets, shutting out lights, and lowering the thermostat, and then there was "supremely ready," which in my life would have been my mother walking out the door. She usually ended up putting her lipstick on in the car. After reading the magazine article, I was excited to have a model to offer my extended family for dealing with our "readiness" drama. We now refer to it whenever we are together and issues around getting "ready" come up.
You can imagine my laughter when, on a recent Sunday morning getting ready to leave for church, I said to my husband, "It's 8:30, we need to be heading for the car," and he said from the closet, wearing only his underwear and socks, "I'm ready."
He knows the family joke. He's lived with my extended family on vacations and reunions. He's heard us all say, "OK, what stage of readiness are we in? Are we just ready or are we supremely ready?" He's heard us all say to my dad, "Sit down and relax, Dad. She's only ready, not even ultra-ready. Three more stages to go."
When I heard my husband say, "I'm ready" this past Sunday, not only did we both start laughing, but by the time I was sitting in church I began to associate those two words with spiritual readiness as well. What does it mean to be ready for the Divine to enter our lives? Are we ready, in our underwear and socks (metaphorically, of course), or are we supremely ready, walking out the door, truly starting the journey? I am reminded of the paralytic man by the pool called Bethsaida in John 5:5–14. He had been waiting at the healing pool for thirty-eight years, saying he wanted to be healed. It is clear to me now that he was not supremely ready. He may have been ready, like my mother in her slip. But until Jesus asked him if he wanted to be healed, he didn't move into a readyer state. He wasn't supremely ready until the teacher came, and then his transformation moved right along.
What's the point of saying we're ready when we're really not anyway? Why not say, "I won't be ready for ten more minutes?" Perhaps we want others to be happy with us, hoping we can fool them and keep them satisfied if we fudge on reality a bit. But if we only pretend we are ready for a relationship with God, who are we fooling? Surely not the Holy One.
God is waiting. At whatever stage of readiness we are, we can begin our journeys, without the need to manipulate or pretend. God will take us right where we are and accompany us from start to finish.
Digging Deeper
1. What are your own stages of psycho-spiritual readiness?
2. When do you say you are ready when you really aren't? Why do you think you do this?
3. How do you distract yourself so that you are never really ready?
4. Some people have to experience a major crisis to undertake their inner work. What events, large or small, have drawn you into doing inner work?
5. Think about some psycho/spiritual disciplines that might help you be more ready to explore. For example, how do you think a daily devotional/meditation would help your stage of readiness? How could a relationship with a spiritual director or therapist be helpful to you? A prayer group? Would you be willing to be accountable to someone or a group for your spiritual journey?
Awakening from a Dream
I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
—Emily Brontë
They say dreams are the windows of the soul—take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.
—Henry Bromel
"Open your eyes. Take a deep breath. Sit up. You're dreaming," I told myself over and over. Awakening from dreams, the ones that you feel so deeply in your body you are sure they are happening, is a precarious act. My dream, my unconscious, was pulling me back in. I, my waking self, wanted to get out. It was an uncomfortable tension. This particular dream was disturbing and I was troubled upon awakening. My heart was beating quickly and my breathing was shallow and quick. I was sweating and wasn't quite sure where I was. I wanted to shake it off, to get out of it. Yet I knew it was trying to tell me something, probably something I did not want to hear and something I did not already know. Because I believe that all dreams come to us in the service of our wholeness and healing, I was able to give myself over to the dream for a few more minutes. I did finally sit up in bed, encouraging myself to breathe, to pray, to ask the Holy for guidance as I opened myself to the possibilities of the dream message.
This dream, I believe, was taking me back about thirty years. I was being asked to consider, to reconsider, the meaning of certain events from that time in my life. New light was being shed three decades later. I was being asked to do another layer of emotional work and to allow for new healing. The vulnerability I was feeling left me weak and scared. I wanted my husband, who was out of town, and a girlfriend, who lives in another city, to hold me. Sitting with this alone was not fun; still I think it was meant to be. I needed the time to turn to God only, with all of my fears, and to let the Holy Mystery soothe me.
Why am I dreaming this? What do these symbols mean? Who is this person in the dream? How is it that this stirs me so deeply? As I held all of these questions up in prayer, the possibilities began to unfold. Events in a friend's life—a difficult and toxic relationship—were triggering memories from a similar relationship in my earlier life. God knew I needed another look at all of that. I needed to look more deeply into my role in that earlier relationship. God, through this dream, provided me with a new lens. It didn't feel good. Still doesn't. I thought I was done with all of this.
There's a saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." I heard myself chuckle. "Okay, God. You win. I am not done with this and you are not done with me. You want me to be healed from the inside out. That light you are shedding is a little startling, though. I am squinting at best. A little dimmer, a little slower would be better. I promise to hang in there. The dream has convinced me. I believe you are with me."
Healing can be slow, confusing, frightening, or thrilling. However it happens, it rarely happens all at once. We revisit our wounds in our life, time and time again, and discover new layers of God's grace and mercy, new layers of healing. It might hurt. It might be scary. My mother used to say, "Being responsible is not for the faint of heart." She was right, and I believe the healing journey is worth it.
Digging Deeper
1. Think about a startling dream you've had. What new perceptions might it be trying to show you in the service of your healing and wholeness? How can you treat this or any dream as if it is a message from the Holy One to aid you in your spiritual life? Begin to honor your dreams by writing them down in a dream journal.
2. Most dreams come to show us something we don't already know. Each part/person/object/geographic location might be a representation of the dreamer's self. Take just one aspect of the dream and let yourself wonder about it? Ask yourself, "What part of me might be represented by that?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moment to Moment by Amy Sander Montanez. Copyright © 2013 Amy Sander Montanez. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
A Spiritual Friend and Companion for You xi
Introduction xiii
I Inner Work is God's Work: Transformed from Within 1
Introduction 2
Ready? 6
Awakening from a Dream 10
Deception 13
Jesus, the Great Receiver 18
Just Say Yes 22
Miracles and Life Abundant 27
When Winter Comes 32
II Holy Ground: Worship that Transforms, Encounters that Transform 37
Introduction 38
Part 1 Holy Ground: Worship That Transforms 41
Laps for Jesus 42
Love with Wild Abandon 46
Prepare My Heart 49
The Oneness of Time 53
Thanks Be to God 57
The Cathedral Concert 61
Part 2 Holy Ground: Encounters That Transform 65
Holding Sacred Space 66
A Moment of Truth 69
Together on Holy Ground 73
Evangelism 77
Talking with Strangers 82
Anything But the Kitchen Sink 86
When the Veil Is Thin 89
III Loafing with God: Transformed By Sabbath 93
Introduction 94
Bricks and Mortar 97
Chimes 101
The Necessity of Silence 105
Loafing with God 109
When Others Pray for Us 112
IV Family, Friends, and Community: Transformed by Others 117
Introduction 118
Immigrant Hearts 120
Reunion 125
Leaning on Friends 130
Who Is My Neighbor? 134
Worth the Effort 138
The Creative Reality of Relationships 143
The Love That Lies Beneath the Woe 147
V Vocation: What's Calling You Now? Living the Transformation 151
Introduction 152
Be Careful What You Pray For 156
Diving In 159
Samia's Kitchen 163
The Chaplain's Prayer 167
For All the Musicians, with Love 171
Blessed and Blessing 175
Worth the Wait 179
Epilogue 183
Recommended Readings and Resources 185
Notes 189
What People are Saying About This
“You can’t read far into this small book before you realize that you are a companion of a skillful counselor and a wise spiritual friend, deeply in love with God, with others, and with the whole creation. You feel like she is right there talking to you, sharing from authentic experience informed by years and years of study and reflection.”
—From the Foreword by E. Glenn Hinson, Author of Baptist Spirituality: A Call for Renewed Attentiveness to God
“I’ve read many books about the spiritual journey, but none offers the liberating pathway of Moment to Moment. Amy Montanez, skilled counselor and therapist, stands before you as if on a spiritual playground, proclaiming, ‘on your mark, get set, go,’ inviting you to embrace your life joyfully as the key to God-given wholeness. I’ll be revisiting its pages time and time again; I know you will as well.”
—The Rev. Michael R. Sullivan, Rector, Holy Innocents, Atlanta, Author of Windows into the Soul and Windows into the Light
“Amy Montanez’s sharp powers of observation lead her to poignant encounters with the holy in a variety of settings including a computer store, a city bank, a street in her neighborhood, and dreams in the night. This wonderful book will widen your perception of God's activity in the world and pique your imagination for how God aggressively pursues us all, even in the most unlikely of moments.”
—Frank G. Honeycutt, Author of The Truth Shall Make You Odd: Speaking with Pastoral Integrity in Awkward Situations